Cash or card: what cash really costs a merchant

The short answer

Per payment, cash is the cheapest way to pay in German retail: 43 cents, against 60 cents for girocard, Germany’s domestic debit card. Relative to turnover, the picture reverses. Cash costs 2.3 per cent, girocard 0.8 per cent and credit cards 2.4 per cent. The source is the Bundesbank study “Kosten von Zahlungsmitteln im Einzelhandel” (cost of payment methods in retail), as at December 2025. Both figures are correct. The difference does not arise at the till. It arises after closing time.

Two measures, two winners, and no contradiction

For this study, the Bundesbank timed around 13,000 payments at 15 points of sale. It also surveyed 268 retail companies. The result is the only reliable full-cost calculation for the German market. Fees, devices, insurance and time all sit in one table:

Cost component per payment	Cash	girocard	Visa/Mastercard Debit	Credit cards
General device costs	€0.07	€0.07	€0.07	€0.07
Payment-method-specific device costs	€0.02	€0.06	€0.03	€0.10
Transaction fees (for cash: cash-in-transit and handling)	€0.08	€0.18	€0.28	€0.48
Insurance and losses	€0.01	€0.00	€0.00	€0.00
Time	€0.26	€0.30	€0.31	€0.35
Total per payment	€0.43	€0.60	€0.69	€1.00
Total as a percentage of turnover	2.3 %	0.8 %	2.1 %	2.4 %

Two things stand out. First, the gap between cash and girocard is 17 cents per payment. That is far less than the usual fee debate suggests. Second, time makes up 26 of the 43 cents for cash. For cards, fees are the largest block.

So why does cash look so poor on turnover? Because of the ticket size. The median cash payment is 25.71 euros. For girocard it is 41.67 euros, for credit cards 44.44 euros. Fixed costs spread over a small ticket produce a large percentage. I describe the same mechanism in the eight cost components of a terminal contract. It applies to cash in exactly the same way.

The cost of cash appears on no invoice

At the till, cash is not the brake it is often made out to be. The Bundesbank measured 18.7 seconds for a cash payment. A contactless card payment without authentication took 15.2 seconds, and one with PIN or signature 23.3 seconds. An inserted card took 25.7 seconds, a smartphone or smartwatch 14.0 seconds. Cash sits mid-table and beats the classic card payment with PIN.

The cost arises elsewhere. Across all payment methods, time at the till accounts for only around 30 per cent of time costs. The other 70 per cent is administration before and after. For cash, that means ordering and counting change, cashing up and writing the cash report. It means hunting down discrepancies, packing safebags and driving to the bank. None of this shows up on a statement. The same people who serve customers do it on the side. It still has to be paid for.

What the bank charges for cash

The second hidden item sits in your own bank’s schedule of prices and services, under counter transactions. Here are two examples, both checked against the original today:

Service	Berliner Sparkasse, FirmenKonto (as at 15 July 2026)	Sparkasse Aachen (August 2026 version)
Deposit at the cash machine	€2.00 per transaction	—
Deposit at the staffed counter	€4.00 per transaction, five free a month	—
Coin safebag	€10.00 per transaction	€7.50 per coin bag plus a booking fee, free up to around 50 coins
Change	—	€0.75 per coin roll (bulk €0.50)

This adds up quickly. Here is a model calculation with freely chosen assumptions. A business pays in at the cash machine on 25 days a month and drops off a coin safebag once a week. That is 25 × €2.00 = 50 euros a month and 52 × €10.00 = 520 euros a year. Together, that is around 1,120 euros a year, before a single minute of counting time is costed. A business paying in at the counter instead pays 20 × €4.00 = 80 euros a month after the five free deposits.

Cash gets more expensive the less it is used

This finding appears in no advertising, whether for terminals or for cash. Since the previous study in 2019, costs per transaction have risen by around 80 per cent for both cash and girocard. For cards, the main reason is that many small merchants have joined and pay worse terms. For cash, the Bundesbank gives a different reason. Its share of transactions is falling, fixed costs are spread over fewer payments, and the cash infrastructure is thinning out.

The trend is measurable. In 2025, for the first time, more purchases were paid without cash than with it. Cash accounted for 45 per cent of payments and 23 per cent of turnover (Bundesbank, Zahlungsverhalten in Deutschland 2025, 17 June 2026). In practice, cashing up does not take half as long just because the drawer holds half as much cash.

Company size and sector matter more than the payment method

This is where it gets uncomfortably honest for small businesses:

Company size	Cash per payment	girocard per payment	Cash as % of turnover	girocard as % of turnover
1 to 9 employees	€0.60	€1.33	3.0 %	3.8 %
10 to 49 employees	€0.56	€0.64	2.5 %	1.8 %
50 and more employees	€0.33	€0.29	1.8 %	0.3 %

For the smallest businesses, girocard is more expensive than cash on both measures. That figure never comes up in a sales pitch. It is still no argument against the terminal. The range from 3.8 to 0.3 per cent occurs within one and the same payment method. So it comes from terms, volume and processes. The lever is the contract, not the payment type.

The sector effect is just as clear. In hospitality, cash costs 3.6 per cent of turnover and girocard 3.1 per cent. In retail in the narrower sense, the figures are 1.9 and 0.5 per cent. The cause, again, is the ticket size. It averages around 12 euros in cash in hospitality, against 21 euros in retail.

The table below applies the average costs to fixed amounts. This is a model calculation, not my own measurement:

Ticket size	Cash (€0.43)	girocard (€0.60)	International debit (€0.69)	Credit card (€1.00)
€5	8.6 %	12.0 %	13.8 %	20.0 %
€12	3.6 %	5.0 %	5.8 %	8.3 %
€25	1.7 %	2.4 %	2.8 %	4.0 %
€45	1.0 %	1.3 %	1.5 %	2.2 %
€90	0.5 %	0.7 %	0.8 %	1.1 %

Counterfeits, till discrepancies and duties that only cash brings

The counterfeit risk is small in statistical terms but painful when it hits. In the first half of 2026, the Bundesbank identified around 30,000 counterfeit banknotes with a face value of 1.75 million euros. That is 4.3 per cent fewer than in the previous half-year. The 50-euro note leads with 14,222 pieces, or 47 per cent. Counterfeit 100-euro notes rose by 61 per cent to 5,043. There were also around 64,900 counterfeit coins, 91 per cent of them 2-euro coins (Bundesbank, 7 August 2026).

Arithmetically, that is seven counterfeit notes per 10,000 inhabitants per year. The legal consequence matters more than the probability. Counterfeit money is not reimbursed. Whoever accepts it bears the loss and hands the note to the police.

One duty applies only to cash. Under section 146(1) sentence 2 of the Abgabenordnung (German Fiscal Code), cash receipts and payments must be recorded daily. Card turnover comes with its own evidence in the payment service provider’s statement. The cash drawer needs someone to account for it every day. This is not legal advice for your specific case. But it explains why administration time is so high for cash.

What does girocard cost a merchant?

girocard is the cheapest card at a German terminal. In published price lists it costs roughly 0.2 to 0.3 per cent of the amount, usually plus 6 to 8 cents per payment. In its full-cost calculation, the Bundesbank arrives at 18 cents in pure transaction fees and 60 cents in total cost per girocard payment, including devices and time.

What that means for a given ticket is shown by three price pages I checked in the original today (7 October 2026). Only the per-payment charges are counted, without rental or device purchase:

Ticket	PAYONE Classic 0.26% + €0.08	CCV €0.06 + 0.159% + 0.06%	SumUp 1.39%	SumUp Plus 0.79% (+ €19 a month)
€5	€0.09	€0.07	€0.07	€0.04
€25	€0.15	€0.11	€0.35	€0.20
€50	€0.21	€0.17	€0.70	€0.40
€100	€0.34	€0.28	€1.39	€0.79

The table explains why “what does girocard cost?” has two answers. In classic contracts with a separate girocard rate, the card is almost a fixed-cost item: the cents per payment weigh more on a small ticket than the percentage. Flat-rate plans such as SumUp have no girocard price of their own; the price page only distinguishes between SumUp’s own cards and all other cards. There, girocard costs the same as a credit card, and from a ticket of around 25 euros the gap to a contract with separate rates is clear. Since 1 January 2026, classic contracts also carry a scheme manager fee of 0.00209 per cent (REA price schedule 04/2025, Nexi girocard price list 1 January 2026), which works out at 2 cents per 1,000 euros of girocard turnover. How the cards differ is covered in the article girocard or Debit Mastercard/Visa Debit.

How high are credit card fees for merchants?

For a consumer credit card issued in the EEA, published terminal price lists charge roughly 1.2 to 1.9 per cent of the amount, sometimes plus a fixed amount per payment. In the Bundesbank’s full-cost calculation, the credit card is the most expensive payment method at 48 cents in transaction fees and 1.00 euro in total cost per payment, or 2.4 per cent of turnover.

Only part of that is capped by law: the interchange fee paid to the cardholder’s bank may not exceed 0.3 per cent for consumer credit cards (Art. 4 of Regulation (EU) 2015/751). The rest is scheme fees and the provider’s margin, and that is where the differences arise. Per ticket, using the same price pages checked today:

Ticket	PAYONE Classic 1.49% + €0.08	SumUp 1.39%	SumUp Plus 0.79% (+ €19 a month)	girocard at PAYONE Classic for comparison
€25	€0.45	€0.35	€0.20	€0.15
€50	€0.83	€0.70	€0.40	€0.21
€100	€1.57	€1.39	€0.79	€0.34

On a 100-euro ticket, the credit card in a classic contract costs around four and a half times as much as girocard. Commercial cards and cards from outside the EEA, to which the cap does not apply, cost more; CCV, for example, lists business cards at 1.6 per cent. The detailed calculation for small tickets is in the article What does it cost to accept credit cards?, the special cases under commercial cards and non-EEA cards.

When does accepting cash make sense?

Cash makes sense for a merchant when the business is small, tickets are low and the till is kept anyway. Under those conditions, the Bundesbank finds cash cheaper than girocard not only per payment but also relative to turnover.

The study offers three pointers. In a business with 1 to 9 employees, a cash payment costs 0.60 euros and a girocard payment 1.33 euros, so cash wins on both measures. In restaurants, cash at 3.6 per cent of turnover is close to girocard at 3.1 per cent, because tickets there are small. And on low amounts, any card pricing with a fixed cents element tips over: on a 5-euro ticket, 7 to 9 cents of card fees are already 1.4 to 1.8 per cent before rental and time are counted.

Cash makes less sense as ticket size and company size grow. From 50 employees, girocard costs 0.29 euros per payment and 0.3 per cent of turnover according to the Bundesbank, cash 0.33 euros and 1.8 per cent. In practice: offering cash alongside cards is economically sound for small businesses with small tickets. Preferring cash only pays off if cash handling is lean; otherwise counting time eats up the advantage. Whether you have to accept cards at all is a separate question; I describe where things stand in the article on mandatory card acceptance.

What to do now

1. Measure counting time, do not guess it. Time cashing up, reconciliation, ordering change and bank runs for two weeks with a stopwatch. Value it at your own hourly rate, not at the minimum wage.
2. Search your bank statement for cash items. Deposits, safebags, coin rolls, booking fees: add up the annual total. Almost nobody negotiating a merchant discount rate knows that figure.
3. Read your bank’s schedule of prices and services, in particular the counter transactions and free allowances. Three deposits a week instead of five changes the total immediately.
4. Pull the average ticket per payment method from your till system. Only then does a debate about percentages make sense. Before that, it is folklore.
5. Check your terminal contract with the per-transaction fee and the merchant discount rate shown separately. On small tickets, the cent amount decides. On large ones, the percentage does.
6. Streamline cash handling instead of abolishing cash. One deposit instead of three, a smaller change float, a fixed time for cashing up. That cuts exactly the block that makes up 60 per cent of the cost of cash.
7. Compare your own figures with the averages. The Bundesbank measures the market, not your shop. If your total differs markedly, that is where the real insight lies.